In 1910, British author Norman Angell argued in his work Great Illusion that war among great powers was impossible because it would harm all. The 1914 war disproved his argument. After the end of Cold War, American academic Francis Fukuyama… Read More ›sci tech news

On May 23, 1967, on-duty officers at the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) were huddled in an underground command center outside Omaha. They had less than 30 minutes to determine if a sudden bout of radio and radar interference was a natural event or Soviet subterfuge masking a nuclear attack.

Al Buckles was the emergency action controller on duty that day at SAC. As soon as he got word of the apparent radio jam, he and the SAC Emergency Actions Team, which included senior officers, were on the phone with NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, and the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon.

The U.S. radars that had gone on the fritz were part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, which was dedicated to scanning the skies for incoming Soviet missiles. Even if no missiles had been fired, intentionally jamming this early-warning system would have been seen as a potential act of war during the politically tense climate of the Cold War.

As the team dissected the information flowing in, airplanes used as mobile command and control centers and bombers loaded with nuclear weapons awaited their directive. The president was just a phone call away.

In short, if the team determined that the Soviets were to blame, their next actions might have sparked global devastation.

Thankfully, no call was placed on that day and the planes stayed grounded. After about ten minutes, Buckles and his colleagues determined that the radar jamming was a natural occurrence: A strong solar flare had bombarded our planet with a burst of charged particles, creating geomagnetic disturbances that disrupted radio communications.

“It was a near-miss event,” says Delores Knipp, a space physicist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who recounted the tale publicly for the first time this week in a new paper in Space Weather.

The decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a political not a military decision. The targets were not military, the effects were not military. The attacks were carried out against the wishes of all major military leaders….

The decision to use the atom bombs was a purely political decision taken almost solely by two politicians alone…

Researchers who have investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for 30 or more years have concluded that he was murdered by a conspiracy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the Secret Service…. Shortly before he was murdered, President John F. Kennedy gave an extraordinary speech at American University. In the speech he came out against continuation of the Cold War that risked all life on earth for the benefit of the profits of the military-security complex and the budgets and power of the Pentagon and CIA.

Economic sanctions, relentless propaganda, meddling in Ukraine, and now a presidential election in which the demonization of Russia has become the central issue of the campaign – all this is building toward a climax that could turn deadly at a moment’s notice.

What David Talbot has done in his newest book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, is trace the origins of this system of “secret government” through a biography of one of its architects. The Devil’s Chessboard seeks to shine a torch down the well of “deep politics”…